About

Bruce Rutledge and Yuko Enomoto founded Chin Music Press in 2002, sensing that as media conglomerates expanded faster than Violet Beauregarde in "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," the time was ripe for small presses willing to publish risky books. Their favorite risk: literature from contemporary Japan.

Chin Music Press teamed with designer Craig Mod in 2003. Mod added an important layer to the press: Chin Music books would not only be risky, they would be beautiful. Mod borrowed from Japanese aesthetics to create “literary objects” — books that are a pleasure to touch as well as read.

Book designer Joshua Powell continues this tradition by joining the sharp-edged prose of our authors with beautiful art direction. NPR called the first book he designed “a triumphant kick in the pants for anyone who doubts the future of paper-and-ink books.”

After the levees broke in New Orleans, David Rutledge, a professor at the University of New Orleans, spearheaded Chin Music’s effort to publish one of the first books about those early days. The success of that book, "Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?" led the press to begin another imprint, Broken Levee Books.

Chin Music Press publishes only a few titles a year so that we can offer books of the highest quality. We also work in digital, visual, audio and print media, sometimes on projects of our own and other times in collaboration with firms or individuals.

Chin Music Press is dedicated to the art of storytelling. As we ride the digital wave cresting at the beginning of the 21st Century, we’re searching for new ways to tell stories about our world.